Your Shopping Cart Is a Character Witness

‍Commerce as Character Study. The Luigi Mangione merchandise reveals our culture's unsettling ability to commodify tragedy through streetwear aesthetics. The alleged killer of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson has become an unexpected nexus of digital archaeology, with online sleuths piecing together his identity through Grailed favorites (Chrome Hearts, Rick Owens) and Goodreads reviews (including the Ted K manifesto).

Our Take: As longtime Future Commerce collaborator Alex Greifeld noted today, creating a "water cooler moment" has evolved from buying Super Bowl ads to more tragic vectors. The digital breadcrumbs we leave through commerce become our character witnesses, turning purchasing patterns into psychological profiles. This commodification of tragedy speaks to what Nick Susi termed the "monocultural moment" — to own the narrative you have to ‘start a war.’ In this particular story, commerce, culture, and criminal psychology converge in a single narrative thread.

The Digital Renaissance: Does GenZ have a nostalgic embrace of digital cameras? Is it a psyop? Does it matter? A new story in NPR marks the curious return to aesthetic image-making, rejecting algorithmic perfection of smartphone photography. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle's upcoming "28 Years Later" leverages iPhone 15 cinematography to redefine smartphone auteurship, collapsing the distinction between professional and prosumer tools in a delicious irony.

‍Home Sweet Homegoods? With many U.S. malls facing closures of anchor stores like Macy’s and Sears, developers are repurposing these spaces into housing. By January 2022, at least 192 malls had plans to add residential units, with dozens of projects underway in states like California, Florida, and Texas.

Life Imitates HBO. In a delicious twist of meta-narrative, the Murdoch children began succession planning after watching their fictional counterparts navigate similar waters on HBO's "Succession." When art becomes a cautionary tale for the very subjects it satirizes, we've entered a new plane of cultural recursion.

The Fabric of Our Lives. D.S. & Durga [partners with Big Cotton] for an olfactory homage to America's most controversial crop, packaging the scent of Southern comfort in a weighted blanket and fragrance duo.

Our Take: This collaboration harkens back to the golden age of agricultural checkoff programs, which we extensively covered in our analysis of industry-funded marketing initiatives. From Aaron Neville's iconic "Fabric of Our Lives" to "Got Milk?" these campaigns shaped generational memory through collective cultural touchstones. Now, Big Cotton seeks to replicate that magic through luxury collaborations. How modern.

‍Quantum Leap. This week, Google unveiled its new Willow quantum chip, which demonstrates extraordinary error correction capabilities that could revolutionize computational possibilities. The breakthrough suggests we're approaching a new threshold in the quantum computing race, with implications far, far beyond Silicon Valley's horizon. 

Maybe every horizon? In any reality? The post, which documents the breakthrough, also low-key hints at the possibility of the multiverse: “It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”

The real question: Is there a universe where Google is able to make Gemini AI a better product? 

Robot Rebellion: A Cruise vehicle defied police intervention in San Francisco, echoing our prescient discussion about our "sh*tty robot future," a key part of last year's Vision report. The incident highlights the growing pains of autonomous vehicle deployment in urban environments, where edge cases become viral moments.